However, New York is not the only state facing hurdles in implementing medical marijuana laws. In states across the country, legislators are struggling to enact the regulations necessary for legalized medical marijuana programs to function properly, leaving patients with long wait times and a slew of confusing procedures. Here are seven other states that are struggling to translate their marijuana legalization laws as they exist on paper into the real world.

Massachusetts

In 2012, Massachusetts's voters approved via ballot initiative the legalization of medical marijuana and state-regulated dispensaries, but overcomplicated licensing procedures allowed not a single dispensary to open. Two dozen lawsuits followed a two-and-a-half-year wait for the law to be enforced.

A team of attorneys will soon file a series of lawsuits to place an injunction on, and overturn Washington State’s Senate Bill 5052, a recently signed law that will drastically reduce the rights of medical cannabis patients in the state while closing dispensaries and establishing an illegal patient registry.

Signed by Governor Jay Inslee in April, Senate Bill 5052 – which takes full effect in July, 2016 – will drastically reduce the amount of cannabis patients can possess and cultivate, making felons out of those who possess currently allowable limits. The measure will also lead to the closure of nearly every medical cannabis dispensary in the state, and will establish an illegal patient registry that is in clear violation of federal HIPAA laws.

The lawsuits will seek to place an immediate injunction on the new law, preventing it from taking effect while the group works to overturn it permanently.

The group of renowned attorneys who will be working on the lawsuits include Sensible Washington co-founders and longtime criminal defense attorneys Douglas Hiatt and Jeffrey Steinborn (who have 70 years combined legal experience), and attorney Aaron Pelley of Pelley Law LLC, among others.

Hiatt tells us that the group will be filing two to three separate lawsuits that will seek to fully dismantle the new law, in order to protect the rights that patients currently have, and to prevent the state from establishing the patient database.

Despite having the upper hand on the drug war, police departments across the country often insist on using dastardly practices to lock people up for marijuana—a substance that is now legal in some fashion in over half the states.

Fortunately, new technology has exposed some of the slithering antics of the law, making it harder for dirty cops to get away with conducting illegal shakedowns and falsifying evidence. This is a brutal lesson that several officers with the Chicago Police Department are now being forced to learn the hard way.

A report from The Chicago Tribune indicates that Cook County prosecutors have filed perjury charges against four veteran cops, three of which worked the narcotics division, for providing false testimony in a case last year in which marijuana was discovered during a traffic stop.

In 2014, four Chi-Town police officers swore under oath that the odor of marijuana is what provoked officer William Pruente to pull Joseph Sperling from his vehicle and initiate a search—leading to the discovery of almost a pound of pot in his backpack.

However, Sperling’s attorney nailed this testimony to the cross after entering video footage obtained from the cop’s cruiser cam that forced a fifth officer to admit, while on the stand, that all of her colleagues were lying.